The Empirical Theorists of Democracy and Their Critics: A Plague on Both Their Houses

Abstract

attack on the possibility of a purely empirical and value-neutral political science has been the so-called “empirical theory of democracy.’ ’ The empirical theorists still claim, as Dahl (1956a: 86) puts i t, that they are simply investigating “the actual facts of political life ” by means of “methods, theories and criteria of proof that are acceptable according to the canons, conventions and assumptions of modern empirical science” (Dahl, 1961a: 767). I t has by now become one of the commonplaces of current political science, however, that their theories have never achieved-and may never have been intended to achieve-such purely neutral and scientific results. This criticism has involved two distinct claims. The first is that even though the empirical theorists may have investigated the workings of democratic political systems in a wholly neutrd spirit, these inquires have nevertheless hod “nonnative implications ” (Walker, 1966: 39 1). Some of the critics have pressed their accusations no further than this point

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